Mobile phones with digital cameras are broadly available in every worldwide market. According to market statistics and forecasts, within the five-year period 2014-2018, annual smartphone shipments are expected to grow from 1.28 to 1.87 billion units; over 80% of all mobile phones will be arriving to customers with embedded digital cameras. New shipments of smartphones will expand the already massive current audience of approximately 4.5 billion mobile phone users and 6.7 billion mobile subscribers; these shipments will also cause significant upgrades of mobile phones currently used by the subscribers. Annual sales of phone cameras to mobile phone manufacturers for embedding into smartphones and feature phones are projected to exceed 1.5 billion units.
The volume of photographs taken with phone cameras is growing rapidly. According to Pew Research, photographing with phone cameras has evolved into the single most popular activity of smartphone owners; poll data shows that photographs are taken by 82% of camera phone users, exceeding even the second most popular activity, texting, which is utilized by 80% of phone owners. According to recent studies, about 27% of all photographs have been taken with smartphones, and smartphone photographs have exceeded photographs taken with any other equipment on major social photo sharing sites.
Hundreds of millions smartphone users are increasingly blending their everyday work and home digital lifestyles based on mobile phones and/or tablets with co-existing paper habits. Paper documents retain a significant role in the everyday information flow of business users and households. Digitizing and capturing paper based information has become even more ubiquitous since the arrival of unified multi-platform content management systems, such as the Evernote service and software developed by Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., which is aimed at capturing, storing, displaying and modifying all types of information across multiple user devices. Many types of printed and handwritten documents are benefiting from digital capturing and availability in electronic document formats, including pages from books and magazines, printed newspaper articles, receipts, invoices and checks, tax, applications and other forms, printed reports, business cards, handwritten notes and memos on legal pads, in specialized Moleskine notebooks or on sticky notes or easels, and many other types of printed and handwritten documents.
Modern scanners offer solutions for some of these information capturing needs. Accordingly, unit volumes of mobile scanners are expected to grow from approximately one million to two million in the next five years. However, the mobile lifestyle of workforce and consumers is increasingly conflicting with scanner-friendly environments and often requires capturing documents or portions thereof under random conditions where users may not have access to their office or home scanners. These requirements and usage restrictions are increasingly stimulating a development of smartphone based document capturing solutions, such as remote check deposit software solutions deployed by various online banking systems or the Scannable software application for iPhone and iPad provided by Evernote. A new breed of document capturing applications for smartphones includes advanced algorithms for lighting, color and shape corrections, page border detection, contrast optimization, noise removal and other features aimed at creating optimized images of photographed documents nearing stationary scan quality.
One challenging aspect of smartphone based scanning solutions is a batch scanning of stacks of document pages, capturing multiple pages of a book and other multiple page scanning sessions. Unlike conventional scanners, phone cameras don't have auto-feeders and their efficient use for capturing multiple pages of content requires special technologies and workflow.
Accordingly, it would be useful to develop efficient mechanisms for batch capturing of multiple pages of documents and other content with phone cameras, where users may quickly expose subsequent pages by moving away already captured sheets or turning pages of a book, followed by an appropriate capturing routine controlled by the smartphone software.